Valley of the Shadow: A Novel (42 page)

Hayes’ personal concern was the poison ivy, of which he had had quite enough across the summer.

Down where the armies faced one another, rifle fire annoyed the afternoon, inconsequential. These scrambling men would be Destiny’s executors.

Destiny? Did such a thing exist? Or was there just an endless collision of human aspirations, governed by chance? Lucy believed in a good and gracious God shaping mortal affairs, and Hayes had never belittled her beliefs. Belief such as hers was a gift, a wonderful comfort, but one he lacked. If he were to fall this day, he expected to fade into nature, into the general immanence, nothing more. War made it hard to credit a merciful God.

“Rud, you’re wheezing,” Crook teased. The corps commander was a few years the younger, but looked to be the older of the two. Crook had lived rough in remote, hardscrabble garrisons, while Hayes had resided in pleasant homes and offices lined with law books.

“Just drinking deep of the fine Virginia air,” Hayes told his superior. “Wouldn’t be half-bad here, but for the war.”

Correcting his footing, Crook said, “Ought to see the Northwest. Hard place, hard. But beautiful, the grandeur. You there, soldier! Tie up that canteen and stop making that racket.”

Hayes and Crook moved a hundred yards behind the head of the column, with Hayes determined to lead and do his duty, and Crook as avid to maintain control. Joe Thoburn had walked along with them for a time before going back to hurry his men along.

Really, it was astonishing. They just might pull it off, Hayes told himself.

The trees broke for a dozen yards, offering a view of the armies below. Puffing smoke, irregular lines stretched toward the hidden river. Beyond, Three Top Mountain loomed. Early’s army was a cork in a bottle.

And they were out to snap off the bottle’s neck.

“By God, we’re all but behind them,” Crook said.

Shots cracked up ahead. Stray shots, then a flurry. No volleys, though.

Hayes felt Crook tense and understood: It wasn’t the shots that worried him, Reb pickets had been inevitable. He just didn’t want his men to start up a howl and warn Early of the size of the force about to descend on his flank.

Crook hurried forward, plowing through a tangle of poison ivy. Hayes went around the bushes and rushed to catch up.

He soon rejoined Crook, who was questioning a captain.

“Only pickets,” the captain assured them both. “No more than a company, and a weak one. They skedaddled.”

“Damn it, though,” Crook said.

Panting, Hayes offered, “We’ve got them. It’s all right.”

Crook nodded. He told the captain, “Push on another two hundred yards, then hold up.”

The Rebs knew something was doing, though. Artillery shells began crashing into the hillside, splintering trees. But the Johnnies were firing blind, guessing at targets.

“Hold up,
halt
!” Crook called.

“Division, halt!” Hayes echoed.

The order ran down the line. Hayes wondered how much the Rebs below them could hear. The Confederate artillery provided covering noise, a quirk of war, aiding an enemy.

“Left …
face
!”

That command ran down the column as well, converting the Indian files into two long ranks. Men pivoted as smartly as they could on the steep hillside. Hayes’ division formed the southernmost wing of Crook’s command, thrust beyond the Rebs’ front line, and he figured the best formation was the simplest. Speed was of more value than finesse.

“Advance your men,” Crook told him.

And off they went, gravity tugging them down the mountainside, with soldiers allowing themselves to hurry, barely maintaining a semblance of good order. Excitement sparked through the air.

Hayes soon caught the animal sense himself, the predator’s foreknowledge that this charge would be irresistible. In their haste, men tripped and plunged face-first. Rifles discharged accidentally. Struggling color-bearers trailed their flags, yanking them from the clutch of branches and briars. But every man’s heart raced.

They were going to roll up the Rebs like a parlor carpet.

“Hold them back,” Crook called as the bottom neared. “Hayes, keep your men together.”

But the soldiers wouldn’t wait. Sensing level, open ground ahead, the entire corps broke into a wild roar. Anticipating an order, men began charging.

Ignoring the pleas of their officers for discipline, dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, of men exploded from the tree line. Flags rose and unfurled. Soldiers hurrahed as if they’d already fought and won a victory. The savagery of it felt barbarous, as if his men were Huns from the pages of Gibbon.

“Come on, boys!” he shouted, unable to contain himself, encouraging men who needed no encouragement.

Ahead, a paltry line of Rebs fired from a barricade of fence rails. But they didn’t fire long. Men in blue swept over the obstacle, knocking it to pieces, collaring prisoners whose faces still shone with amazement.

Hayes wasn’t sure he commanded anything now. He was just one man among many, his rank stripped of its potency. He kept up as best he could.

The veterans didn’t need his guidance, anyway. They stormed across the intervening low ground, brushing aside all resistance, to aim at the heights where the Reb infantry waited, up where the Johnnies were hurriedly countermarching and manhandling guns, shocked and caught unready.

The gray columns scrambling to refuse the flank were too few. Hayes saw that his division—his bellowing, beautiful mob—stretched well beyond the defenses. On his left, Thoburn’s boys encountered resistance, blasted by artillery up on the hill, but they soon surged forward again.

The national colors, division and brigade flags, the torn regimental standards, all thrust onward, racing ahead, climbing the slope with their blue-coated clans about them. Few men fell. The handful of Johnnies opposing them couldn’t reload fast enough to stop them.

On the right, the last Reb cavalry bolted, with Averell’s troopers charging them in the wake of Crook’s attack. To the left, Confederate infantry made a hopeless stand in Thoburn’s path while cannoneers harnessed horses to save their guns. Straight ahead, a patchwork skirmish line faced Hayes’ division.

“Straight for their rear!” Hayes called. “Go straight for their rear!”

Enraptured, he wasn’t panting anymore. Pointing his pistol up the long slope, he shouted his throat raw.

On the distant left, the noise of battle swelled. Sheridan had advanced the rest of the army, Hayes figured, taking swift advantage of Crook’s success.

Most of the Rebs on the heights turned tail and ran as their foes closed in, but a lone brigade stood its ground, ragged and fierce. They were giving Thoburn’s lead regiments all they had.

Hayes had no idea who led those Johnnies, but he had to admire the man.

Colliding more than once with rushing men as he traversed the field, Hayes found Hiram Devol of his old brigade and ordered him to outflank the Rebs blocking Thoburn, to put an end to that lonely, desperate valor.

“Threaten their flank,” Hayes said. “They’ll break, they’ll catch the panic.”

The brigade’s color-bearer staggered. Another man caught the flag.

Devol said, “They’re already breaking, look.”

Across the entire field, hurrahs rang out. Fleet with excitement, Hayes rushed back to his right, outpacing the younger officers on his staff. He couldn’t recall such pure exhilaration, but he never had been part of so easy a victory.

When Hayes rejoined the vanguard of his division atop the heights, he saw an unrivaled spectacle of defeat. Men in gray and shades of mottled brown fled by the thousands, converging on the one road left to them all or just plain running through the countryside. Mounted batteries whipped their way southward and caissons overturned, crushing men and toppling the rear teams, tangling harness and panicking horses left upright. Waving their swords and evidently pleading, maddened officers rode through the mob that had been a proud army only minutes before. When an ambulance lost a wheel, its crazed team dragged it along until it splintered, flinging its cargo. In ruptured defenses, abandoned cannon waited, silent and prim, for a change of masters. A headquarters tent collapsed as men tripped over its ropes. Soldiers sprawled forward, shot in the back. A wagon laden with ammunition exploded.

It reminded Hayes of an illustration he’d seen of the Last Judgment.

5:00 p.m.

Confederate center

As Ramseur’s worthless cowards ran, Early galloped for Pegram’s leftmost regiment, a hundred honest men who had not budged. Closing on the trench line, he recognized the flag of the 13th Virginia.

Riding straight for Captain Sam Buck, Early shouted at the top of his voice, “You, Buck! You men, all of you! Stop those goddamned cowards down there. Shoot ’em like dogs, if they won’t do their duty.”

Buck’s face showed incomprehension. What couldn’t the lowborn simpleton understand?

“I said stop any coward who retreats,” Early railed, hating the high-pitched sound of his own voice. “Any man who won’t stop, shoot him dead!” Growing more furious by the moment, he shrieked, “What are you waiting for? Shoot those yellow bastards, shoot them now!”

Buck shook his head. Slowly. As if the damned fool couldn’t do that much right. The Virginians closed around their captain, in evident support. Glaring at Early. Insubordinate. Traitorous.

Early pointed at the mob of fugitives again. “I said
shoot
them, damn you.”

Sullen as a whipped buck nigger, a Virginian threw down his rifle, then just stood there. Eyes on Early. Another man cast down his weapon, too. Then another.

“I won’t give that order, sir,” Buck said at last.

“Then you be damned!”

5:00 p.m.

Union Sixth Corps

Sheridan wove in and out of the foremost skirmish line, waving his hat and shouting, “We’ve got ’em, boys, come on! Crook’s in their rear, don’t let him have all the glory! The cavalry’s chasing them high-tail, come on, come on! Don’t let up, go after them! Don’t stop!”

Wherever he rode, men cheered as they rushed forward.

5:15 p.m.

Gordon’s Division

Nobody could rightly tell what the devil was going on, only that something wasn’t exactly right. Uproar aplenty, a ways over on the left, but the Yankees had been fussing around all day. Nichols couldn’t see much, what with the turn of the ground and thickening smoke to westward. Just dark clouds high up, rolling over that mountain. But they all heard Yankee cheering and no Rebel yells.

It wasn’t fear of the blue-bellies themselves that pestered Nichols. Wasn’t scared of fighting them one bit, he didn’t believe. But he’d sprouted a dread of being captured, and he wasn’t apt to go handsome on his bad leg. It hurt, too, even when he kept his weight on the other foot. Not that there was much weight to him nowadays. All he could do was hobble, like Jackie Tate, the crippled fellow back home, the one who sat outside the livery barn, a butt of jokes. Clear as a vision from the Lord, Nichols foresaw Yankees overtaking him, pummeling him, mocking.

He stood in the trench beside his friends, growing uneasy but held in place by pride. Waiting for the Yankees to be fool enough to try to climb that bank right to their front. Steep as a wall, it made for the best position on Fisher’s Hill, officers and men alike agreed. No Yankee was coming up that just-about cliff and living to brag on it.

And when the Yankees blundered forward at last, sure enough, they didn’t get very far. They just fumbuddled around, as if they couldn’t make up their minds to step up and do their duty.
They
weren’t the problem, although they wanted watching. The worrisome doings were elsewhere, off in that westward ruckus, off where a man couldn’t see.

Not knowing was a terrible thing.

General Gordon showed himself, though not for long. He rode off looking as though the Devil were at him, sour as pickles. In his wake, the officers got jittery, telling their men too often to stand tall.

“Gordon takes on that look of his, ain’t nothing good ahead,” Ive Summerlin noted.

And there wasn’t nothing good. The battle marched nearer, still unseen. Scared fellows ran by, wailing that the Yankees were in the army’s rear. All they got was hard jests for their yellowness. Then the artillerymen on the left dragged off their guns with ropes, hauling them back to be hitched up to their limbers.

It was the rarest thing for the guns to desert them. Without even waiting to learn what was afoot.

“Dear Jesus Lord,” Tom Boyet cried.

And there they were, the Yankees. Over where that battery had been, one crest away.

“Going to be cut off, why don’t we get orders?” Sergeant Alderman wondered. That itself was cause for worry, since Alderman was a steady man in a fight.

“Here they come!” Lem Davis shouted. It took a few seconds for the rest of them to realize he meant they were coming from the front, too.

Gog and Magog, Jebusites, Midianites … the Yankees who hadn’t seemed to be doing no more than fussing around were advancing, in great numbers, heading straight for the hill, as if they couldn’t see its awful steepness, its impossibility, or lacked the sense to care.

“They’re in behind us, they’re blocking the road!” a trash Jeremiah hollered.

Nichols didn’t run at first. None of them did. They were John Gordon’s soldiers, after all. They lit into the Yankees, firing down into the packets of skirmishers and then at the oncoming ranks with their insolent banners.

But catastrophe, like Judgment, could be evaded for only so long. Nichols wasn’t the first to run, nor did he quite intend to run at all, but in a way he could not quite explain he found himself hopping rearward, doing his best to keep up, losing sight of his comrades before spotting them again and spying Colonel Atkinson, abandoned by all, attempting to free an artillery piece stuck in a ditch. Nichols’ heart said go on down and help, but he reckoned his leg about robbed him of much use.